Katakana Conquering

I'm getting there, but oh so slowly. My little sister is staying with me for a week and a half, so it's made distractions easier than ever. I'm hoping I can meet my Friday goal - Katakana (at least the 107) being mine - and that shouldn't be impossible, because the first 46 katakana are mine. Conquered. And I am reviewing hiragana daily, and twice daily starting tomorrow, assuming I can rejoin the 0500 club. 

I am about to climb this mountain and reach the summit. And it will be good, very good. 

46 down, 61 to go.

Katakana Killer, Hiragana Review, and Kanji Horror

I am pretty solid on the hiragana now, and close to halfway through the basic katakana. I like these shapes a lot, but Helen of Troy they are much harder to recognize and distinguish than hiragana. It's still going to take a lot of work. Still hopeful I'll have them down by Friday end, but it's going to be a huge pain. At least hiragana is mine. I'll drill it twice a day for at least a month, probably three, and then it will be burned into my mind for good. 

Still, I'm over halfway through the first wall. My vocabulary is steadily climbing, and I can recognize almost fifty kanji now. I love this language so damn much. I've only flirted with it at this point, but the kanji sequence is just unbelievably beautiful. For the most part. There are some pretty unbelievable parts too. For example, 女、おんな、means 'woman.' Okay, no big deal. Then the next character I learned was three women together:　姦、かん、'wicked', 'seduce,' 'rape.' Because that's what anyone would think if they saw three or more women gathered together. Obviously.

...If I laughed at that, am I going to hell? 

Hiragana Conquered, Anki Aid, and Kanji Heaven

Hiragana is mine. Just finished the last 36 this evening. I can now slowly and clumsily pronounce Japanese script. Feels good man. Granted, it's purely recognition-based, meaning I can see あ　or ほ and tell you what it says, but going the other way is much sketchier. Writing out the kana ("fifty f*cking times!!" ~Namasensei) is going to help with that. Now I just need to review hiragana once, maybe twice a day. That's like, two, five minutes tops. Means I have much more time to devote to....katakana. Another wall, but this one will go down much faster than hiragana - or at least with less effort. I hope. Anyway, I think I'll have all the kana learned by next Friday easy, thanks to realkana. Seriously that online app was a godsend. I've only beaten hiragana on easy mode (hard mode uses all the different scripts which even now makes me want to tear my hair out), but this is an accomplishment and I am pleased as punch. 

Anki is similarly a godsend. I finally learned how to edit/merge/sort decks, and combined with the new ability to (kind of) read Japanese script, I am going to absolutely devour vocabulary. Learning six thousand words and three thousand kanji suddenly doesn't seem as impossible as it did three days ago. I can already recognize 107 hiragana characters, about twenty or thirty kanji, and about forty or even fifty words, depending on how my decks treat me tomorrow. 

Speaking of kanji. Oh my. It is beautiful. The way the characters build on one another and flow into one another's meanings is breathtaking at times. For example,　休、やすむ, yasumi, meaning 'rest', combines the character for 'man' with the character for 'tree.' The image of a man resting beneath the shade of a maple on a mountain climb is going to be impossible to forget, like a scene right out of Your Name. And so many of them are like that! They might still make me scream in frustration later, but this method of learning the simplest kanji first, learning the radicals, and then seeing how those unfold into more elaborate characters is going to be a wild, thrilling voyage. I can't wait. 

Onto katakana, more vocabulary, and more kanji. After I have conquered the kana I can start the grammar study. I'll say I won't begin Tae Kim till next Friday, but I'm hopeful it will take much less time than that. 

Hiragana Half, Kanji Hell

I've got the 46 basic hiragana solid, and fairly decent on the dakuten. I'll need another day before those are locked down. But I can read a whole bunch more words now, which makes vocabulary much easier. In all I'm comfortably sitting on 71 hiragana, 25 words, and five kanji. At this rate I'll finish the hiragana this week, and by next week at this time katakana should be mine as well. Then I can forever leave romaji behind. 

Realkana is an absolute godsend for this. It's like flashcards on speed. Because the kana follows such a regular pattern, it's like memorizing different first declension Latin nouns. Easy as hell. Then once I get confident, input the random format and master it again. 

I've got Genki 1 and 2, and am debating whether to start it right after learning the kana or waiting until I dig into more of the top thousand vocabulary. Do I use it first or Tae Kim?

Similarly, do I start learning kanji now or do I wait?  And how do I learn it? To be honest, brute-forcing my way through 3,000 kanji seems like a nightmare. English is terrible in its own way too, but at least phonics gets you through almost everything if you're careful enough. But phonics doesn't apply to kanji. Or so it would seem. Apparently the kanji radicals have names, and if you learn those you can often work out the pronunciation of the kanji. Supposedly. 

Kanjidamage and James Heisig's approach seems to make the most sense - systemize these thousands of characters in order of complexity, and approach them with those patterns in mind. I have kanjidamage's 625 kanji deck in Anki already, and Heisig's book, so I might just start trying a lesson from the latter every couple of days and see how far I can get. Unfortunately, his book (at least volume 1) doesn't have the hiragana readings (why?!!?!!?!!), but those would be easy to find, since he's just using the list of jouyou kanji, and hell, even Wikipedia has a table of those, including kana readings. I could even make my own Anki deck as I go along - which is almost certainly what I'll do. 

The plan is settled then:

            1. Finish learning the hiragana this week. Keep chipping away at the Memrise                                vocabulary.

            2. Learn the katakana by next Friday

            3. Start the first few lessons of Heisig now, and when the kana is yours, start making                    your Anki deck based off his system. 

            4. When the kana is yours, start seriously going through Tae Kim, and when you finish it, move on to Genki 1 and then Genki 2. Buy them if you hate studying on a screen - a reward you'll deserve, since by that point you'll have learnt the kana and probably more than a hundred vocabulary words. 

The bulk of my time is just going to be spent learning the ~250 characters that are the kana until I can remember them in my sleep. After that, five minutes a day in review for three months should finish the kana for good. 

This is going to be hard, but so far it's been a blast. 

Hiragana, Namasensei, Vocabulary, and Flowchart.

I can't do anything until I learn the kana. I tried doing vocabulary work on Memrise yesterday and it was more frustrating than helpful. Namasensei's Youtube tutorials are hilarious and good motivation, so now I've got the hiragana vowels down, and he goes through basic grammar as well. Will do one video of his per day. 

I made my first steps into Anki as well, downloaded the basic hiragana and two vocabulary lists which will become more helpful as I learn how to pronounce things. There's about 114 hiragana, but supposedly if I master the first 46 the minor changes in the rest won't be too hard. 

I'm about a third of the way through the hiragana so far, so I'm hopeful that by Saturday at this rate I'll have the basic forms mastered, which will make learning vocabulary much easier. The flowchart will look like this, I guess:

Hiragana --> vocabulary --> katakana --> vocabulary --> grammar --> kanji --> vocabulary --> rinse repeat cycles of vocabulary, grammar, and kanji. 

Without a doubt the first wall is the kana. Let's see if I can learn both of them in a fortnight. In the meantime, I've got the most common vocabulary and kanji, and I'll chip away at them (can't help myself) as I learn me some kana. 

Japanese Language Plan

I've been immersed in Japanese art for the past three years and it's time to go further. Anime, manga, light novels, etc. are going to be part of my life for a long time to come, so it makes sense to spend some work and complete the following goals: 

            1. Watch anime raw

            2. Read manga raw

            3. Read light novels

            4. Read visual novels raw

I doubt my kanji will ever be good enough to read Japanese novels (Kokoro, Sea of Fertility, etc) untranslated, but if it ever is, consider that goal No.5. 

There, I have my four goals, which can be reduced to one: consume Japanese art without translation. Subordinate goals immediately come to mind:

            1. Learn hiragana

            2. Learn katakana

            3. Learn vocabulary

            4. Learn grammar

            5. Learn kanji

Hiragana and katakana will have to come first. Namasensei will help out with those. Once I can read and write both scripts, I'll increase vocabulary learning. 

The most common thousand words will let me understand a lot. I'll shoot for a base vocabulary of 3,000 words, in order of most common. There are lots of apps for that. I've started with Memrise, and will supplement/replace it with shared Anki lists, especially those aimed at the N5-N1 levels of the JPLT.

I'll use Tae Kim for the beginning grammar, and then Genki 1 and 2.

Kanji is just going to be hard. I don't have a plan for that yet. Genki has a kanji introduction so I'll figure out the rest after I finish both volumes. Since LNs, manga, and VNs all use kanji, I'll need to know around three thousand to read them largely unaided. Ugh - that is a serious wall, but I won't have to even think about it for six months.